This has been something which I have been thinking deeply about for a very long time. I knew at one point I did want to open source Hacker's Edge, I just wasn't sure when or how.

A couple days ago I started to release the Hacker's Edge source code in phases. The first phase was the initial rewrite to a terminal-based hacking game. This is made available for historical reasons, and to display why the game was rewritten so many times. I wouldn't recommend anybody running this version of the game as it will not scale well, and it doesn't have proper multiplayer. This version of the game can be found under the ConsoleGame directory within the public BitBucket repo I will post a link to below.

The second rewrite, which more closely resembles the current code, which ran live between January 2015 and March 2017 is located in the beta_game directory. This code is easier to run, however it has proved to be rather unstable at times due to thread locking. I eventually did an overhaul of the entire codebase to both modularize it, and make it 100% event-based. The currently live game engine code isn't available yet in my BitBucket repo, and I will be making it available by the end of this week sometime.

I am currently debating on if I should market this source code release as a Game Engine, or as the actual game. The current form of the Hacker's Edge game is a very modular and pluggable system. It can support multiple front-ends, and player content running virtual machine back-ends. It can work as a stand-alone game engine for developing hacking simulation games fairly easily without knowledge of Python. Once this code is released, you will soon understand what I mean by this.

Anyways, enjoy the current source code releases as a peek into the deep history that is Hacker's Edge development.